


keep the light we're given

by autoclaves



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: (as in. no powers & they aren't all prep school kids), Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - High School, Character Study, Coming of Age, F/F, Gen, Platonic Relationships, there are romantic relationships but the platonic ones are equally important, they're all girls babey, this is just about growing up & also an experiment in prose, whatever the EXACT feeling conveyed in ribs by lorde is? that.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:07:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24107974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoclaves/pseuds/autoclaves
Summary: Ronan grins like an animal. Neon lights up her throat, her long tangled hair, and Ada aches. Ada is always aching, always hungry, a flaming bonfire eating up a space meant for candles.(Or: Senior year approaches with a crashing, heady vengeance. Ada is half-child, half-god, all hunger. It’s like Lorde said: It drives you crazy, getting old.)
Relationships: Henry Cheng & Noah Czerny & Richard Gansey III & Ronan Lynch & Adam Parrish & Blue Sargent, Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 9
Kudos: 38





	keep the light we're given

**Author's Note:**

> idk idk idk idk this was supposed to be a tma fic with the same premise but something didn't click and i ended up with a 2.5k trc fic for some reason. they're all girls i blacked out and it happened. it's MY crippling fear about growing up so i get to choose the niche high school au to write for it !
> 
> warning for mentions of underage drinking and disordered eating, but not enough to warrant an actual tag, i think.
> 
> title: call it dreaming by iron & wine

It’s about to storm. The air is thick and humid with its anticipatory gloom; ozone on the horizon, clouds spilling close, trees heaving against the pale vastness of sky. 

Still, Ada stays put, even when the wind starts blowing with a crispness that knifes through her thin khaki jacket. The cold of the ledge she’s sitting on doubles. 

Next to her, Ronan inhales, exhales, inhales again. Menthol-flavored cigarette smoke wraps its long fingers around the both of them. 

“Got any plans for college, Ada?” she asks after another drag. The air stirs with the movement of her arm as it drifts towards her pursed mouth. She smells like menthol, like thunderstorms, like pool water and chlorine leftover from her practice earlier. 

“Get out of this place,” Ada says. _Preserve it,_ she doesn’t say. She doesn’t know what she wants. She feels half-asleep, dazed, a car-crash dream of a person. 

Ronan laughs with her head thrown back. “It’s a shit place.” 

A lone bird flies overhead. Its silhouette is stark and limned brilliant with light. 

Ada wants to photograph her, dark hair tangled up in the wind and fingers balancing a cigarette between them in careful, practiced motions, pressed sharp against the dull breath of the coming storm. She wants to photograph them all; all of these moments slipping through her hands like ripples of water. And in the end, it won’t be about the photograph, only about the tangibility of its lines. The physical reminder of them. (What was the quote, the Atwood one about memory and impermanence? _You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water.)_ Instead she says, 

“Should you be smoking that?” 

and Ronan says, “Probably not,” with a blue-mist exhale. Answer enough in its own way. The two of them, they’ve always been just fine at saying things without speaking them aloud. 

Senior year approaches with a crashing, heady vengeance. Midwinter widows itself. February flits past and then March, and then all of a sudden it’s a slow-burn April that doesn’t feel like one at all. Exams edge closer. Summer presses its golden-hour lips against the horizon even though it’s hardly spring. Everything plays out in jerky motions, pressing fast-forward on a badly rendered animation; the world is underwater and they’re drowning, fatalistic, collapsing like dead leaves into a swimming pool. 

“This feels like a montage in the middle of a teen movie,” Gansey says as they trawl through the wide-open streets together. Ada’s half-child, half-god, all hunger, starving for something more. “But maybe a bad one.” 

“You think everything feels like a montage from a teen movie.” Blue laughs, and the fields sing back at her. They’re Henrietta born and raised, Blue and Ada both, but she’s always been better at it than Ada. 

“A _bad_ teen movie,” Gansey corrects, stumbling into her on purpose. Their voices rise into the night. They will never be so young again, Ada thinks. Never, never. 

Ronan grins like an animal. Neon lights up her throat, her long tangled hair, and Ada aches. Ada is always aching, always hungry, a flaming bonfire eating up a space meant for candles. 

On the way home, she listens to Lorde and thinks she understands what Gansey means, as much as someone can understand what another person means without being in their body. _Mom and dad let me stay home, it drives you crazy getting old,_ her headphones scream as she watches the streetlights flash. Their glare turns the surrounding windows golden, into something they’re not. 

Nora dances with her on the porch. It’s a blustery Sunday, and the screen door rattles with the force of the breeze. 

“Can you believe we’re almost seniors now? Doesn’t it feel like we started high school not six months ago?” 

Ada shrugs gracelessly. “Everything’s slipping away,” she says. The world feels too big to fathom, too small to fit into. 

Nora hugs her, then. The wind whips at their clothes, howling through the gaping cracks and windows of Ada’s house. It’s a cruel spring this year. “I’m not going anywhere,” she promises. In the washed-out gray of the afternoon, she looks more ghost than girl, but Ada believes her anyway. 

“I know, Nora,” she says. So they dance on the porch, singing, _and we can be heroes, just for one day._

“Jane.” It’s Gansey, whispering. She’s a little drunk, lips patchy with the cheap boxed wine they’d bought from a 7-11, one of the city ones that hadn’t bothered to ID them. “Janie. Jaaaaaaaane.” 

Blue kicks her feet onto the dashboard. Outside, the trees glow with a gloaming sunset. “Mhmm?” 

“Nothing. I just liked how it sounded.” 

“Okay,” Blue says. Her hand rakes through Gansey’s uneven hair affectionately. Ada watches from the backseat where she’s spilled around Nora and Ronan. Alcohol makes her limbs loose and liquid—this is another moment she’s desperate to keep. 

Ronan wants to buzz her hair. Ronan wants to buzz her hair, so they’re all here now, coexisting messily in the liminal space of Blue’s bathroom as Ronan chops it off to the roots and turns on the clippers. 

_How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder?_

Ronan raises her eyes to Ada’s in the mirror, as if she knows what she’s thinking. The fluorescent light overhead turns the both of them dangerous. 

“Long live,” she says, and raises the clippers to her head. Dark strands fall into the stopped-up sink, drifting down its smooth curved sides to join the longer coils already settled into the bottom. 

Blue cheers. Nora and Gansey both grin, the youth dripping off their faces to catch on fire. Ada says, “Long live,” and tilts her chin at Ronan in mimicry of a raised glass, a private toast. 

Bonfire, candles. Blunt-toothed animals. There’s an unbearable intimacy in the transformation of cutting one’s hair. 

Blue kisses her at a party. Ronan kisses her at a party, a different one. Blue apologizes and lets her down as gently as she can, which is to say, not gently at all, because both of them understand what it is they each want. 

Ronan stops speaking to her. 

That’s fine. Ada has always wanted too much and been denied it. What’s one more hunger, on top of all the rest? 

Haeri puts on The Mountain Goats after a calc cram session. She’s in just a tank top and sweatpants, short hair flattened into odd angles as she slouches against her creaking desk chair. 

“I feel monstrous sometimes,” she says. “When I’m manic. It’s like I’m going mad, it’s like the colors are breaking my heart, it’s like the _thing,_ the hunger is pouring out me in wounds. It’s like I could swallow the world whole, or at least, the part of it that I care about.” 

Ada sits very quietly, letting the tinny music hum her bones and teeth and spine. She hasn’t known Haeri long, not the way she’s known Blue since childhood, Gansey and Ronan and Nora since the first day of high school, but she knows her well enough to understand some things don’t need a response immediately. Some things don’t ever have one. In that way, they’re more alike than not. 

“I want everything,” she says as the bridge of the song tapers off, picking out the words like they matter. “There’s got to be more than this, and it’s selfish, but I want to think I’m _made_ for more than this.” 

“You want to be seen,” Haeri says, nodding along to the music. 

_And I want to go home, but I am home._ Ada contemplates these lyrics as they echo around the room—nothing more dreadful than to be told that the thing you want does not exist. To be told that the thing you want has already been attained, and found wanting in its attainment. 

That night, Ada dreams about being seen. She is unzipped like a ragged jumper and left exposed, someone else inhabiting her hands and eyes to use them as their own. It’s terrifying. It’s the worst thing in the world. 

Gansey is hunched next to her, writing a paper on _The Secret History_ for a last-minute extra credit assignment. 

“That would have been us in another world,” she says. She fumbles her grip on the book and swears. 

“Dark academia murder cult?” 

“Yeah!” Gansey says, sounding far too enthusiastic. Ada loves her with a fierceness too big to contain. She’s itching out of her skin with it. 

_Beauty is terror,_ she reads from the selection of carefully typed quotes on Gansey’s screen. _Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it._ The next one: _We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us._ Does it work the other way, then? Can horrifying things be forgiven if they are beautiful? Are hungry things simply a variant of beautiful ones? 

May sweeps in with a burst of heavy green and Ada stops eating. 

Out of curiosity, mostly. Is starving as a ritual any different from starving as a baseline? Does it hurt more when the body has physical cause for it? All she seems to have these days are unanswered questions. Unanswered questions, and a disappearing home. 

She finds that it’s not the hunger pangs that get her. It’s the cold that hurts most. She’s always cold nowadays, shivering, body burning heat instead of calories. But the emptiness of it is almost like a high. It buzzes between her teeth and settles into her stomach like it’s always been there. 

Ronan plays Florence and The Machine on the car radio. Her record-scratch voice sings along to all the lyrics _(and we’re just children wanting children of our own… but did I dream too big, do I have to let it go?)_ and Ada writes them down on the spot like she can press that sound into paper. 

_And everything I ever did was just another way to scream your name—_

It thunderstorms again that week, so Blue and Ada and Gansey tuck themselves onto the smooth flat windowsills of Gansey’s house to watch the rain pour. The drops make heartbreaking rivulets down the other side of the glass. _All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was._ She’d read that essay last year. Where is the place water calls the womb, then? 

Blue and Gansey start orbiting each other like satellites. Ada finds a reason to leave. May is for selfishness; she has the ache inside and that is enough for now. 

Nora grabs her by the wrist and demands that she eat. Ada shrugs her off. The bones of her hand grind under Nora’s grip, rusted shut with worry, and she can see how they protrude. 

Haeri says, “The hunger isn’t worth it.” Light wolves at her throat as she does, turns her into poet and spectator and entity. 

“I just want to keep _something,”_ Ada admits. She wants to apologize without having to confess to anything, but that’s not how it works. The sky is streaked white and gold today. Summer looms over them all like an absent mother. It should, by all rights, be the happiest time of her life. 

Gansey finishes the final swim meet of the year with a bang and three new school records. Blue, as anchor, wins them the freestyle relay by half a second. According to Ronan when she recounts the story with a great deal of ribbing, Gansey kisses Blue for the first time after their last event, when they’re both still chlorine-drenched and triumphant. 

“It was _romantic,”_ Gansey protests, laughing, as the rest of them tease. “We can tell our children that our first kiss was after Aglionby’s greatest victory this decade.” 

“Sure, Gansey Three,” Nora drawls out. 

“Children?” Blue gasps, mock-scandalized. 

“You’re stuck with me, now, Jane. We’ll go down in history.” 

_Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time._

Ada imagines long arms skimming the surface of the pool and yearns. Not for Blue or Gansey, not for the water, but for an intolerable, unquantifiable _something._ To be remembered. To be seen. 

_In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead._

She starts eating again. Last month feels like yesterday, feels like a foreign country. Dreaming ahead, ahead. Nora dances with her, this time in a field full of long grass and telephone wires that circle its edges. 

“We’re gonna live!” she yells, out of nothing and nowhere. Ada recognizes the feeling with a sudden clarity. 

Ronan is sitting stiffly on her bed, spine perfectly straight as if being drawn upright by a live wire. There’s a distance of two feet between them, and she is refusing to let go of the careful tension running through her whole body. 

“Ronan,” she says. 

The only acknowledgement she gets is a nod, a tiny jerk of a thing. 

“Ronan,” she says again. “Is it so unbearable? That I would want you?” 

Ronan flinches. Ada does too, a second after; an echo, a delayed reaction. 

“Tell me.” This time it comes out a demand. It comes out hungry. Old habits die hard. 

In the silence, Ada twists her mouth, stands up. She’s taking a step to the door when Ronan grabs her by the wrist and pulls her back. 

“It’s not unbearable at all,” she tells her, and Ada doesn’t know how to respond. She wants and wants and wants, and now that she _has,_ she has no idea what to do with the thing inside her hands. 

“Okay,” she answers, stupidly. “Okay?” 

A smile is finally edging its way onto Ronan’s face. “Okay,” she says, and moves closer to Ada. She doesn’t let go of her wrist. 

_The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold._ Who would describe a lover in ivory and gold? There is only Ronan, darkened in the sunset. There is only Ronan. Fool’s gold, if anything, but all the more precious for it. 

The days slide by in a series of vignettes, and Ada still aches for them all. It’s the summer sprawling before them, it’s Ronan’s thunderstorm mouth, it’s the easy bend of Blue’s shoulder and the freckles appearing on Gansey’s elbows and Nora’s crescent-moon smile and Haeri’s hair newly bleached violent blue. The laugh-tangle of them existing in tender light. 

_We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?_

_To live._

_To live forever._

“Long live,” Ronan says on the first day of June. They’ve stayed up the entire night, all six of them, and the dawn has never been so red and bloody and beautiful. Ada thinks she could die with how fast and how dangerous her heart is kicking. She’s on fire with it—she’s the gasoline, the matchsticks, the arsonist and the burning house. 

“Long live,” Ada replies onto Ronan’s lips. She feels so vividly expansive that she thinks maybe there’s room enough inside her for a bonfire yet. She’ll live, she understands that now. They all will. 

**Author's Note:**

> things that ada quotes in the fic (marked by italics, in order of appearance):  
> cat's eye, margaret atwood  
> ribs, lorde  
> heroes, david bowie  
> portrait of fryderyk in shifting light, richard siken  
> riches and wonders, the mountain goats  
> the secret history, donna tartt  
> south london forever, florence + the machine  
> the site of memory, toni morrison  
> sappho (if not, winter, trans. anne carson)  
> angels in america, tony kushner  
> the picture of dorian gray, oscar wilde  
> the secret history, donna tartt 
> 
> additional notes:  
> \- as you can tell from the media i consume i am gay and ready to cause problems  
> \- this is very personal & experimental & i don't expect too many views for it, i just need to get it out because i'm Having Feelings About Things right now


End file.
